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Vulture (Marvel Cinematic Universe)
NOTE: This article is about the incarnation of Vulture from the Marvel Cinematic film series. The mainstream version can be found here: Vulture. Adrian Toomes, also known as Vulture, is the main antagonist of the 2017 Marvel film Spider-Man: Homecoming. He was the CEO of Bestman Salvage until he was driven out of business when Tony Stark opened his own salvage company, so he used the remains of Chitauri and Ultron Sentinel technology to become a black market weapons dealer and obtained a vulture-themed flying suit. He was portrayed by Michael Keaton, who also played Betelgeuse, Carter Hayes, Chick Hicks, Ken in Disney/Pixar's Toy Story 3, and Raymond Sellars. Biography Past At some point in his life, Toomes met a woman named Doris. The two fell in love and eventually married. During their marriage they had a daughter, Liz. Toomes founded the Toomes Salvage Company which cleaned up after major Superhero battles. He and his team were eventually employed to clean up after the battle between the Avengers and the Chitauri in New York. Starting his organization While his men were removing part of the destruction created by the Avengers battle, including a Leviathan and a Chitauri chariot, Toomes is around as well. He seems a hard-working and friendly man. When Jackson Brice suddenly turns up for work despite having been absent the entire morning, Toomes sarcastically comments that it is nice that Brice managed to join them for the afternoon. Brice merely replies that his alarm clock did not work and Toomes, although not convinced at all, lets it slip. Toomes then heads to Herman Schultz, who is trying to break apart the Chitauri chariot, and reveals to him that normal tools will not work on their advanced materials. He tells Schultz that it is far more effective to use the Chitauri's own weaponry on their Chariots, proving it by easily prying the metal apart with a Chitauri blade. While the work is in progress, a group of people shows up. Their leader, Anne Marie Hoag, swiftly gains the attention of Toomes and his men and reveals to them that the newly-founded Department of Damage Control is now legally in charge of all superhero cleanup missions. She tells Toomes and his men that they are no longer employed here. Toomes is dumbstruck and tries to reason with Hoag, claiming that he and his men worked hard for this job and that his men all have families and would be out of a job. One of Hoag's men claims that it is Toomes' own fault for overreaching and the outraged Toomes strikes him in the face. Hoag's men all draw their guns but Toomes is already calm again. Hoag understands Toomes' grief and tells him that he and his men can negotiate for re-compensation with her superior Tony Stark. She also reminds them to hand in all alien material they already salvaged and threatens that keeping any of it will be met with prosecution. The same night, Toomes and his co-workers all meet up at the company. All still cannot believe what has happened to them. They all watch the television in which the creation of Damage Control under Tony Stark is announced. Toomes is outraged and feels betrayed by the world. When one of his co-workers, Jackson Brice, mentions the truck of the alien tech they already salvaged and mentions that they have to turn it in to damage control, Toomes reveals that they will not hand it over. He claims that the world is changing and that they will be changing too. From this night, Toomes and his men build advanced weapons and technology out of the Chitauri material intending to sell it to criminal buyers. In order to do so, Phineas Mason built a mechanical flying armor themed after a vulture for Toomes so he can steal advanced technology from Damage Control to build more weapons. Four years later, Toomes' illegal business is booming and equipped with his suit, Toomes is able to steal more technology with ease. Despite their successes of earning money, Toomes couldn't bear to tell the truth about his new business to his wife and daughter. Toomes also constantly ignores the "master plan" of one massive heist by his chief tinkerer Phineas Mason, as he prefers to keep his operations under the radar to avoid any investigations from the Avengers and Damage Control. Further business While two of Toomes' men, Schultz and Brice, meet with a possible buyer named Aaron Davis, they fire some of their weapons (made out of Ultron Sentinel parts) as a demonstration. The detonations draw in Spider-Man and while Schultz and Brice manage to drive off in their van, they are pursued by Spider-Man. While Brice fires his alien weaponry at Spider-Man, accidentally dropping one of the guns, Schultz panics and calls Toomes and asks for backup. Toomes sweeps in in his vulture exo-suit and grabs Peter and flies off with him. However, while Toomes is flying higher and higher, Peter manages to wrench free by activating the parachute in his suit. As Peter plummets back down to the ground, Toomes continues flying off and returns to his lair as he sees that his men escaped successfully. Back at his lair, Toomes waits for the van to return. When Schultz and Brice eventually turn up, Toomes is especially angry at Brice for firing the weapon in a place where people live. Brice, however, does not care at all and seems not the slightest bit concerned, even arguing that Toomes wanted him to move the merchandise and that's what he did. However, Toomes stated that he wanted the merchandise moved without much attention and Brice caused multiple explosions during the demonstration and escape. He also states that Brice is irresponsible and untrustworthy - giving Brice's alias "The Shocker" as an example that he is not taking anything seriously. Despite this, Brice refuses to heed Toomes' warnings, resulting an annoyed Toomes to fire Brice and telling him to leave. Before attempting to leave, Brice implies that this decision might fall back on Toomes later, as he threatens to reveal Toomes' illegal operations to Toomes' family, Toomes decides that he cannot let Brice go after all, so he grabs an alien weapon from a nearby table, believing it to be the anti-gravity-gun. However, he accidentally grabs the wrong gun which kills Brice by disintegrating him. After a brief shock about what he did, Toomes takes Brice's shocker gloves and tosses them to Schultz, telling him that he is the new Shocker now. Toomes and his team then continue their operations. A few days later, they plan to ambush a Damage Control convoy which is delivering more futuristic technology to their high-security vault. While Schultz and Mason sit in a van surveying the road the convoy is taking, they are watched themselves by Spider-Man. When the convoy arrives, they give Toomes the go-ahead and Toomes sweeps in from the air. Without anyone inside the trucks noticing, Toomes uses a phase-disrupter created by Mason to enter a truck without much effort. However, when he gets out of the truck again, Spider-Man attacks and webs both Toomes and the bag of loot he is carrying. Although Spider-Man manages to take the loot bag from Toomes, Toomes is able to fly off and furthermore, Spider-Man is trapped inside the truck and delivered to the Damage Control vault. Back at his lair, Toomes is furious about the failure. When Mason once more offers to upgrade Toomes' equipment for the "Big One", Toomes turns him down once more and concentrates on their next step - selling the equipment they already have. While Toomes is ranting about Spider-Man, Mason points at the TV where it is revealed that Spider-Man saved a group of High School students, including Toomes' daughter Liz, at the Washington Monument. Staten Island ferry deal Together with Schultz, Toomes sets out to deliver the equipment to their newest buyer, criminal Mac Gargan. The deal is supposed to take place on the Staten Island ferry. Schultz and Toomes enter the ferry and when the ship is out on the water and Toomes sends Schultz to meet with Gargan. However, Spider-Man is onto them and is listening to the conversation between Schultz and Toomes. Although he knows Schultz from their earlier struggle, Peter has not yet seen Toomes without the suit and thus does not recognize him as the Vulture. While Schultz is dealing with Gargan, Spider-Man attacks and takes down the men. When Toomes sees this, he heads to his van on the ferry to don his vulture exo-suit. Although Peter sees it, he cannot engage Toomes directly because multiple FBI agents who have secretly been monitoring the deal, reveal themselves, allowing Toomes to jump into the van and don his suit. He emerges from the van, completely shredding it in the process, and flies towards Peter while firing an alien gun. While flying around the ferry and firing at Peter and the agents, Toomes also frees Schultz from his web restraints and screams at him to make a run for it. While Schultz heads to the main deck, Toomes both fights Peter and the agents. While Toomes uses his wings a shields from the bullets and also uses them to cut the webs Peter fires at him, Peter manages to fire several webs at Toomes gun, causing him to drops the gun, which starts malfunctioning due to the webbing. The gun fires a laser right through the ferry, cutting it in half and causing it to sink. During the chaos, Toomes flies to the front of the ship where Schultz jumps off and lands on top of him. Toomes then flies himself and Schultz to safety while Peter is left to deal with the chaos on the ferry. With their cargo lost and their partner Gargan arrested, Toomes' team is in need of a success. Back at their lair, Schultz tells Toomes that he wants to leave the team because their business has become too dangerous, however, Toomes convinces him to stay by telling Mason that they will prepare for Masons' big plan. Schultz agrees to stay for this final heist, which will make them all extremely rich. Dealing with Peter Parker For the final heist, Toomes returns to New York and then spends time with his family, thus being present around the time of the Homecoming of his daughter Liz. Unbeknownst to him, Liz is going to the Homecoming with Peter Parker. When Peter arrives at the Toomes household, he is horrified when Toomes opens the door and welcomes him inside. Despite Peter recognizing Toomes, Toomes does not yet know who Peter is. Although Peter behaves noticeably weird, Toomes is friendly the whole time and even offers to drive them to high school despite Peter insisting that he does not have to. While driving, Toomes notices Peter's weird behavior and listens to the conversation of Liz and Peter and overhears that during the two events where Spider-Man disrupted his business, Peter Parker suddenly vanished - even while on the school trip in Washington. Realizing that Peter is Spider-Man, Toomes prevents him from leaving the car at the high school - telling Liz that he will be giving Peter the "dad talk". When Liz has left the car, Toomes draws a gun at Peter. He asks whether Liz knows and when Peter feigns ignorance, Toomes deduces that Liz is neither aware of Peter being the Spider-Man nor him being the Vulture. Toomes tells Peter to give up and threatens to kill him if he ever interferes with his business again, however, as Peter saved Liz' life in Washington, Toomes spares Peter's life. He tells Peter to forget that their conversation ever happened and tells him to show his daughter a good time at the ball - though not too good. With this threat, Toomes drives off after Peter has left the car. Despite having given Peter the choice to leave the superhero business behind, Toomes has stationed Schultz nearby to stop Peter should he come after him. Final Heist Peter decides that Toomes cannot be allowed to keep selling dangerous weapons to criminals and decides to go after him. After taking down Schultz, Peter manages to locate Toomes by tracking his phone which he left hidden in Toomes' car. He arrives at a warehouse which is completely empty - save for Toomes. While Toomes is tinkering with some equipment, Peter confronts him and slowly walks up to him. Toomes tries to justify his actions to Peter, claiming that the rich and the powerful do not care about people like them and that these people need to make a living somehow. Peter, however, is determined to stop Toomes and Toomes calls in his Vulture exo-suit which is operating manually. The suit sweeps in, missing Peter multiple times. Although Peter evaded the exo-suit every time, Toomes suddenly implies that Peter is not the target. Peter realizes that the suit is crashing every column in the warehouse and it is too late to escape. While Toomes leaves the building, the entire warehouse comes crashing down on Peter. Outside of the ruins, Toomes calls in his suit, dons his mask and lifts off towards a nearby advertisement sign with view on Avengers Tower. At Avengers Tower, a cargo plane carrying several boxes of Avengers equipment, including the Hulkbuster armor, a new shield for Captain America and Thor's belt, flies off to deliver the cargo to the new Avengers facility upstate. On his sign, Toomes waits until the plane lifts off and then takes flight and pursues it, missing Peter who has freed himself from the rubble and has attached a web and is clinging to Vulture's suit. Although Toomes notices that he is somehow slower, he does not notice Peter hanging behind him. Toomes eventually reaches the plane and, using one of Masons' devices once more, phase-shifts the outer hull and is able to enter the plane. He manipulates the tracking device of the airplane so that it seems at Avengers Tower that the plane is still on course. However, Toomes is actually hijacking the plane and the "plane" tracked by Avengers Tower is a drone fired from the vulture suit. After changing the destiny coordinates of the plane, Toomes enters the cargo hold and opens several boxes. Among the things he finds is an Iron Man helmet which he contemptuously tosses aside. However, through a security camera on the plane, Toomes suddenly realizes that Peter is clinging onto the plane and is trying to separate the Vulture suit from the plane, which would both lock Toomes in the plane and reveal to the Avengers that the plane is off course. Toomes jumps out of the plane and into his suit and confronts Peter on top of the plane. During the battle between the two, Toomes tries to ram into Peter to throw him off the plane. During their battle, Toomes accidentally slams into one of the turbines, destroying both the turbine as well as partially damaging the vulture suit. As the plane is about to crash, Peter uses his webs to manually move the steering fins of the plane as to not have it crash into the city. Peter manages to steer the plane to the coast but cannot stop it from losing altitude quickly. Meanwhile, Masons desperately tells Toomes to get out of the plane but Toomes is not willing to leave without any loot. He is unable to get out in time and when the plane crashes on the beach at Coney Island, Vulture is still inside the plane. When Spider-Man regains his consciousness next to the burning plane, Vulture suddenly emerges from the plane and brutally lands on him. Toomes unleashes all his anger onto Peter and beats him furiously, even grabbing him with his claws, flying into the air and then slamming Peter onto the ground. Toomes grabs Peter with his wings and is about to impale him but then sees a crate of valuable loot lying around. Realizing why he has come and that he can still make the heist a partial success, Toomes drops Peter and flies towards the crate, intending to carry it back to the lair. However, Peter realizes that the vulture suit has taken heavy damage during the battle on the plane and is malfunctioning and about to explode. Although he warns Toomes, Toomes does not listen and keeps trying to carry the heavy crate. This proves to be too much for the vulture suit which explodes with Toomes mid-air - blasting Toomes into the wreckage and fire. Fate Despite their differences, Peter immediately heads into the wreckage and carries Toomes outside. Once a safe distance away from the plane, Peter collapses and both of them fall into the sand. After recovering, Peter uses his webs to tie Toomes to the crate he was trying to carry, leaving him for the police. When Happy Hogan later turns up at the wreckage with some agents, they find Toomes still tied to the crate with a note from Spider-Man attached as well. Toomes is then arrested, and, still having contact with his family, advises them to move out of New York, as he does not want to have them nearby when he is put on trial. Toomes is eventually sentenced to prison and inside the prison, he meets Mac Gargan again. Gargan states that there are no hard feelings between the two and tells Toomes that he has friends outside that want to see Spider-Man dead, also claiming to have heard a rumor that Toomes knew Spider-Man's identity, however, Toomes lies and states that if he knew his identity, Spider-Man would be dead already before going to talk with his family. Personality Adrian Toomes was apparently a kind, hard working man who did what was best for his family. However, after losing his job, he became poor, calculating, disgruntled and a salvaging shop owner based in New York City who arms himself with dangerous Chitauri technology, specifically a pair of mechanical wings for his revenge on Tony Stark for muscling him out of his government deal and for other criminal purposes. He comes into conflict with Spider Man in the film and whilst simply seeing him as a nuisance initially he began to show a slight bit of respect for him after the latter saved his daughter's life (despite still threatening to kill him for intervening with his work). Even after being defeated by the hero, Toomes chose not to give away Spider-Man's secret identity that he deduced since Peter Parker had saved both his daughter and himself. Powers and Abilities Toomes is a normal human who lacked superpowers of his own, but makes it up with his Vulture Exo-Suit which granted him ability to fly, superhuman agility, superhuman speed, superhuman strength, and superhuman durability which created with help of Phineas Mason aka. Tinkerer. The suit consists of bomber uniform, and metallic body armor, outfitted with a pair of talons on the feet, a winged detachable steel harness to fly, and a pair of controllers with magnetic lock device to manually control the wings, and modified flight helmet that posseses HUD system. The suit also have decoy drones that can distract radars, remote control system to control the suit without need to wear it, claws on the feet harness to carry heavy objects, and feather blade on the wings. The Vulture suit that Toomes wore however, had one weakness: Alien technology within the suit is known to become volatile and malfunction when exposed to high levels of radiation or electrical power, including the kind emitted by arc reactor cores. Reception Most critics and fans have considered Michael Keaton's Vulture to be one of Spider-Man Homecoming's biggest strengthshttp://screenrant.com/spider-man-homecoming-concept-art-robotic-vulture/. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called Michael Keaton's performance as the Vulture "one of the strongest, most sympathetic villains of the entire series". Tufayel Ahmed of Newsweek stated that the Vulture is "robustly served in the script" and that Michael Keaton "elevates the part with a deft balance of considered dramatic choices and zany comic book fun". TT Stern-Enzi of CityBeat "Keaton’s sneaky and thoroughly menacing performance is what’s needed for this film". Kristy Puchko of Comic Book Resources praised the Vulture as "the best MCU villain” since Loki. Tim Brayton of Alternative Ending called the Vulture "the best villain in any E-ticket comic book movie since at the very least Tom Hardy's Bane in The Dark Knight Rises". Matthew Pejkovic called the Vulture "as domineering and intimidating a villain as seen in the Marvel Universe yet." and stating this is "thanks to Keaton’s menacing performance." Linda Cook of Quad City Times stated "Keaton is superb as a super-villain whose motives are complex but understandable." Allyson Johnson of Cambridge Day called the Vulture "the best villain of any Marvel film since Loki". Kyle Anderson of Nerdist said "Keaton as the Vulture is perhaps the best villain in the entirety of comic book movies, up there with Tom Hiddleston’s Loki or Heath Ledger’s Joker." Robert Roten of Laramie Movie Scope called the Vulture "a more complex, believable villain than one usually sees in these kinds of films". IGN stated that the Vulture is "quite a timely villain" and that he "can be, in his own way, as relatable as Peter". However they also stated that the Vulture is "never really as fully fleshed out as he could have been", but finally stated that he "does manage to elude the Marvel movie villain streak of hampering a fine actor with a weak role". Mike Ryan of Uproxx stated "Michael Keaton is at his villainous best" and says that "What’s interesting about Toomes is that he knows he’s a low-rent criminal that is under the radar of The Avengers. He’s not trying to take over the world, he just wants money so that he can buy his family nice things. That’s really it." Screen Rant ranked the Vulture as one of the 8 Best MCU Villains, calling him a "criminal genius" and "a common man with a backstory that most can relate to". They also praised how "he has a personal connection to Peter Parker", Keaton's "menacing performance" and his "very cool costume". WatchMojo ranked the Vulture as #2 on their "Top 10 Things Spider-Man: Homecoming Got Right" list. Trivia *Keaton appeared in movies from both Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC thus far, having played Vulture and Batman, respectively. *Despite his flexible business insight to earn profit through reverse-engineering Chitauri's weaponry when his salvage business went to hell, he is shown to be quite short-sighted and lack of big business vision since he only try to earn profit by selling these cutting-edge weapons through street gangs rather than big buyers who are willing to pay millions to billions of dollars to acquire these weapons like major crime syndicates like the Mafia, Yakuza, Triad or Big Drug Cartels as well as others world powers outside the US like: China, Russia, UK or France. Furthermore, they also offers him more protection against Spider-Man, especially superpowers like Russia or China. However this may have been because the Triad and big drug cartels would have had more devious, and sinister plans with the Chitauri weapons, and Toomes did not want to hurt anyone else or draw the big guns to him. 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